Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The The Rhino Times, Greensboro, NC

By Orson Scott Card

March 6, 2014

The End of the American Peace

The Russian invasion of the Crimea isn't anything new, and it didn't begin with
Obama's presidency. Remember that during the election of 2008, Putin sent
troops into Georgia, ostensibly to protect the rights of a minority, but really to
keep Georgia from charting a course that was too independent of Moscow.

Putin distracts his people from the corruption and oppression of his
administration by making Russians feel proud again. He does this by bullying
newly independent nations that used to be part of the Evil Empire.

Russia is still an imperial power, and it's still evil -- totalitarian and
expansionist -- under the leadership of Putin. It just isn't Communist.

When Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, we had a weakened President. Bush had
been strong, but by then it was clear that he lacked public support for any
kind of military intervention.

Also, Georgia is remote, so that there was no way for American forces to
intervene; and it is strategically unimportant to American and Western
interests.

Ukraine is not remote. Ukraine is economically vital -- it is to Russia what the
wheat and corn belts of the Midwest are to America. Not only that, but
whatever the yearnings of the Ukrainian people might be, it is very hard to find
an era when Ukraine was an independent nation.

We may -- no, we should -- feel great sympathy with the yearning of
Ukrainians for complete independence from Russia. Russia has been a vile
overlord from the beginning of Moscow's domination under the Tsars, and
Ukraine suffered more than anyone from Stalin's campaign against
independent farmers and then from Germany's invasion during both world
wars.

Even more than Poland, and very much like the delta region of Nigeria, Ukraine
seems fated to be ruled by stronger neighbors. There are no natural defenses
to hold back invaders.

There is only one way countries like Poland and Ukraine can remain
independent. They must have a protector that is more powerful than any
invaders, yet doesn't want to capture the prize for itself.

For a thousand years, Ukraine has been the prize tossed back and forth
between the Golden Horde, Russia, and Lithuania-Poland, with Germany
coming into the game during the twentieth century. That's why Ukraine has
never been independent. There was never a benevolent protector, only captors.

Since the collapse of Communist rule and the breakup of the Soviet Union,
Ukraine had its first chance for independence. Ever. And it had that
chance for one reason only:

The United States of America.

Russia was weak for a while, but it was always stronger than Ukraine, since
Ukraine participated in the weakness of the USSR but came away from it with
almost no resources except agriculture. Russia could have kept Ukraine as a
satellite or forced it to become an integral part of Russia -- except that the
United States said no.

We didn't say it loudly. But the message was clear: Hands off the newly
independent former SSRs (Soviet Socialist Republics). Stay out of Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and the Caucasian and Asian
SSRS as well.

And until the Left weakened George W. Bush on the absurd grounds that he
was wrong to wage war on the centers of terrorism, that message was obeyed.

Then came Barack Obama. We knew he was going to be a foreign policy
disaster when Russia invaded Georgia and candidate Obama declared that we
shouldn't do anything ourselves, but take the matter to the UN Security
Council.

Apparently he didn't know that Russia has a veto on the Security Council.

His ignorance was not surprising. After all, he is the first President to be the
product of our new "relevant" educational system. The first to attend
universities where history has been taught through the filter of the "anti-war"
(i.e., anti-American) propaganda of the 1960s.

Here is the myth that Barack Obama, like so many Americans who have
swallowed the dogmas of the Left, believes:

America is a bully, picking on smaller nations and throwing our weight around.
We are the cause of all the wars and evils in the world, and if we just let
other nations find their own way, there would be peace and harmony
everywhere.

This is impossible to believe if you know history at all. So in order to get people
to believe it, the Leftists who dominate the American universities and the
American media make sure they keep you from learning history as much as
possible.

They have been almost completely successful. Only the tiny minority of people
who actually study history on their own understand that this myth is the
opposite of true.

Here's the truth: Big nations always take whatever they want from small
nations, unless there's a bigger nation nearby that makes it too costly to
do it.

When the big nations cooperate, they do nasty things like the partitioning of
Poland, which continued until Poland ceased to exist as a state.

When they don't cooperate, we have wars, hot or cold.

This is the way the world has always worked and will always work. It's like the
laws of economics. You can deplore them, you can wish things didn't work as
they do, but you can't repeal those laws.

Barack Obama is the Beloved Leader of the America-hating Left -- and yes,
they hate America and everything it stands for, until you say so, and then they
get all tetchy and accuse you of impugning their patriotism. Well, of course we
impugn their patriotism. They don't have any. They think patriotism is
embarrassing. They call it "American Exceptionalism" and think the idea is
absurd.

Except that America has always been an exception to almost everything.

We haven't been perfect, and we've had bloody struggles as we wrestled
with mistakes from the past. Native Americans, slavery, civil rights, women's
rights, religious freedom -- we have been far from perfect.

But that doesn't mean we aren't a huge, glorious Exception.

1. We are a nation founded on ideas, not ethnicity. We exist in a particular
place, but we have permitted people to come to us from all over the world and
become American. No other nation before us ever did that.

Some groups assimilated more slowly than others. Germans were probably the
slowest -- compared to them, Latinos are assimilating at lightning speed. And
ties to the motherland persist generations later -- remember how long Irish-American donors funded the terrorist of the IRA. But most immigrants have
come here eager to raise their children to be American.

Because if you accept the ideas of America, you are American. Period.

But the American Left have rejected those ideas, every single one of them.
They have carved out an new anti-American ethnicity within our borders and
they have taken almost complete control of our universities and our media.
Their revolution is arrogant, repressive, bullying, dishonest, and mean.

And Barack Obama is the first of their number to be elected President. That's
why he has no qualms about governing unconstitutionally, which he has done
from his first day in office. They have nothing but contempt for the core
American ideas.

2. We are a nation that has aspired to behave morally in our foreign
affairs. Again, we have been far from perfect. But American leaders who tried
to play old-style international politics found out that when the American public
learns the truth about how the game is played, we don't want to play it.

We didn't mind building an empire in North America. Manifest Destiny was a
popular idea, and nobody got thrown out of office for invading Canada or
Mexico.

But then we grew up a little. When we began to realize what it took to create
and keep an empire, we hated it. The only way to hold on to the Philippines
and Cuba after the Spanish-American War, for instance, was to behave
barbarically.

And we didn't want to be barbaric. We aspired to be a nation that behaved
in a New Testament manner toward other nations. You know: Turn the other
cheek. Love your enemies. Do good to them that despitefully use you.

As opposed to "kill every man, woman, and child, and slaughter even their
cattle."

We wanted to be the Good Guys. Slow to go to war, but implacable once
we decided to fight.

So yes, we conquered Western Europe as Russia conquered Eastern Europe
during World War II. But we were slow to enter that war, and we tried to fight
it according to rules of human decency.

Even when we did massively terrible things -- Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki --
it was with the goal of shortening the war and saving far more lives in the long
run.

Notice this, when you think America isn't Exceptional: Wherever Russia
conquered, people were enslaved, blocked from escape, ruled under a
totalitarian system where you could be imprisoned for saying the wrong words.
And if a nation tried to vary even slightly from this system, in came the troops.

Wherever America conquered, nations kept their independence, as long as they
established free institutions. They could thumb their noses at America with
charmless insouciance ... and American troops did not come in to throw out
the nose-thumbers.

We got rid of our own colonies and pressured our allies to get rid of theirs.

We did go to war, to try to keep aggressively imperialist Communists at
bay. We could see that wherever Communism got power, personal rights and
freedoms disappeared.

So, following the Truman doctrine, we went to war in Korea, Vietnam, and, on a
smaller scale, in dozens of other nations, to keep Communist "revolutions"
funded and directed from Moscow from ending the people's hope of freedom.

Some of our allies in this struggle were not clean-handed. Corruption and
various degrees of repression marked some of our allies. We were tolerant of
governments that varied greatly from our ideals.

But anybody who thinks such allies were as repressive and evil as the
totalitarian states has no sense of proportion. Besides, we didn't invade
everybody and turn them into American clones, even though the Left claims
that we did.

Some of our uglier allies gradually become more democratic -- South Korea,
Taiwan. Some threw out their pro-American bosses and replaced them with
something closer to American-style democracy -- the Philippines, Spain,
Portugal. Some had their ups and downs -- Greece, Turkey, most of Latin
America.

We made plenty of mistakes, and we've paid for them. Check out the
Vietnam War memorial. And the Ayatollahs' Iran and Saddam's Iraq were
poster children for what happens when American diplomats don't behave as
Americans think their government should behave.

But compared to every other nation in history, we have been the most benign
superpower, ever.

The only nation that even comes close is Britain -- they, for instance, decided
unilaterally to abolish the slave trade. They announced it and began seizing
slave ships no matter whose flag they flew. You know -- imposing their
cultural ideals on people from different cultures, without asking permission.

Were they bullies when they did that? Or saviors?

Were we conquering imperialists when we invaded Europe in World War II? Or
liberators? Did our troops stay in Europe and Korea in order to make them
part of our empire? Or in order to keep Russia and China from making them
part of theirs?

Only idiots and malicious anti-American would claim any kind of moral
equivalence between us and our enemies. Wherever we conquered, nations
remained or became independent, and people remained free or became freer
than they had been before.

Where our enemies conquered, the opposite happened.

Despite all our mistakes, we have been extraordinarily generous to former
enemies and bratty allies alike. America has been a force for good in the
world like no other nation in history.

3. We could only be a force for good because we had the ability to project power
-- and by that I mean violent military force -- wherever it was necessary.

States governed by evil, bullying, expansionist rulers only kept their
misbehavior within bounds because America actively opposed them -- using
military force wherever that was the only way to stop them from conquering.

Without military power and the willingness to use it, America could not
have maintained the peaceful world system that has made the West so
rich.

Every nation that has tried our economic system has prospered. But only
because of our military protection has this even been possible. Does it even
need saying that there would be no Taiwan, no South Korea, no Western
Europe, no Japan as powerful economic forces in the world, were it not for
American vigilance and sacrifices in maintaining their independence?

But Barack Obama took office in the firm belief that we were a force for evil,
and he has systematically weakened us.

He began with his world apology tour. He bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia
and chummed with the Islamist ruler of Turkey. He openly expressed his envy
of dictators. He sided against Israel as far as was politically possible. He
withdrew us prematurely from Iraq and now from Afghanistan.

He has signaled weakness at every opportunity. He drew a line in Syria,
and when they crossed it he did nothing.

The world watched as Islamist terrorists invaded our consulate in Benghazi,
assassinated our ambassador and three others, and Obama's reaction was to
do nothing to protect them and then, after they died, lie and lie about who
attacked and who was responsible for our failure to support our own people.

Did his kinder, gentler foreign policy make us any friends?

Quite the opposite. The image of America even among Muslims has
plummeted under Obama.

Bush's foreign policy made us worth having as friends, because Bush defended
liberty and kept his word. But Obama keeps no promises, defends no friends
-- doesn't even defend our own soldiers and officials under military attack.

Under Obama, America has become an unreliable ally, a protector that
refuses to protect. And he is weakening and shrinking our military so that we
won't be able to project power even if we had the will. Even if our survival
depends on it.

It's not that Barack Obama doesn't know how to be tough. If he had shown
half the firmness with America's enemies that he has shown in slapping
around the Republican Party and the few elements of the media that don't lick
his shoes, we would be in a much stronger position in the world.

Why should Putin negotiate with us about anything? Ukraine is none of
our business because we don't have the power to make it our business.

It is Europe's business -- because it isn't just the Crimea that's at stake. Do
you think the governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, with huge
Russian minorities, don't see the handwriting on the wall? They just lost their
independence as surely as Ukraine did. Poland, Slovakia, Czechland, Hungary,
and Rumania are also trembling. They know what Russian soldiers and tanks
look like within their borders, and they can hear them coming.

We can't unite Europe behind the defense of Ukraine or any other eastern
European nation, because most of Europe's energy comes from or flows
through Russia. Putin can turn off the lights and stop the traffic all over
Europe whenever he wants.

Maybe if America were still a credible world power with a strong will, we could
lead Europe in taking bold action.

But it is Putin who has joined Syria and Iran in showing that might makes
right, and America won't and, increasingly, can't do anything. Just as Eastern
Europeans are preparing to be very, very obedient to Putin, so also the Middle
East is preparing to be very obedient to nuclear Iran.

Do you think China isn't looking at what's happening in Ukraine, and
thinking: Taiwan is ours now whenever we want to take it.

The only thing that kept these evil, expansionist governments from taking
whatever they wanted from smaller nations was the United States of America --
the superpower that used its incredible strength to protect other nations and
preserve their freedom.

The America that said, about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, "This will not stand," is
now led by Barack Obama, the worst president in our entire history. In five
years, he -- and the American Left -- have had their way, breaking down our
strength and turning us into a former superpower.

The result is not a more peaceful world at all. Their claims were all lies and
delusions. America really was the great Exception. The World Power that
protected the little guys instead of swallowing them up.

We weren't perfect, but we were the best in all of human history.

Now it's over. And here's what we'll get: The collapse of the world economy.
Not suddenly, but bit by bit for a while, as other nations manipulate,
monopolize, and disrupt international trade.

We'll reach a tipping point down the line somewhere, and all this global
prosperity will collapse, leading to worldwide depression -- and poverty, and
famine -- from which we may never recover.

But whatever the final tipping point is, remember this: It began when Barack
Obama and the American Left dismantled America's power and withdrew
us from our role as protector of the small nations of the world.

In the name of stopping America's "bullying," they have opened the door to all
the real bullies.

Our weakness will unleash savage repression that will eventually reach every
corner of the world.

This isn't about Barack Obama being our first black President. It's about
Barack Obama being our first President from the New Left. Our first anti-American President. Our first President to believe all our enemies' slanders
against America.

And because he has always governed without Congress, without any kind of
cooperation with the opposition party, he will not compromise even now.
Because Obama cannot learn from his mistakes.

He is such a fanatic, such a True Believer in the fantastical dogmas of the Left,
that he and his whole party are deliberately stupid. They will continue to
drive us toward the cliff -- toward several cliffs at once, in fact -- and when
anyone points out the danger, they will denounce them, ignore the warnings,
and step on the gas.

 Many people have asked OSC where they can get the facts behind the rhetoric about the war. A good starting place is: "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" by Norman Podhoretz, who takes on the "Bush Lied, People Died" slogan.